Keeeb

Innovation

The newly formed company haven’t revealed any great details about the product, but they’re calling themselves a “wearable computing and augmented reality venture” and claim they’ve “developed an amazing pair of stereoscopic glasses combined with super low latency gesture tracking”.

1. Innovation is stated value and a priority.

There are people, titles and budget assigned to assuring that innovation is part of the culture. One way to do this is to have an innovation team making sure that everyone knows their ideas will be heard and more importantly—management commits to hearing them.

2. Welcoming innovative ideas means making the time to explore them .

Innovative organizations know that if all the time in a day is spent taking care of emails, attending meetings about the status quo and fighting fires there is no time to think about and discuss innovative ideas. It’s not easy to step back from the response-based activities to the more generative process of creating something entirely new. If people are too busy to hear about and consider innovative ideas, they won’t be too busy for long.

Just like accessories maker Jawbone had to release a re-tooled version of its Up fitness band following not-so-flattering reviews, Nike is now reportedly testing a next-generation Nike+ FuelBand in the wild. The device should address some of the annoying shortcomings of the original clip-on product and bring out new features.

For starters, the FuelBand successor will incorporate Bluetooth Smart wireless technology . Also known as Bluetooth 4.0, it allows for a considerably reduced power consumption whilst maintaining a similar communication range compared to Bluetooth 3.0.

As Bluetooth Smart is featured on Apple mobile devices from the iPhone 4S onward, the next Nike+ FuelBand will instantly support these low energy features on newer Apple devices right out of the box.

Piksi is an RTK GPS receiver with open source software that costs one tenth [ 1 ] the price of any other available RTK system.

We designed Piksi with the belief that providing this level of positioning precision at a radically lower cost would open it up to a much wider range of applications. We are particularly excited about its use in autonomous vehicle systems. Civilian and hobbyist use of UAVs has increased dramatically over the last few years, yet highly accurate, low cost localization solutions are not available yet. We hope that Piksi will help to fill this gap and push the envelope of what is possible with these systems.

UX, as user experience is known, is the new black in business culture . Most of the executives I meet with, regardless of their industry, now promote UX as key to their product strategy. That's a big change from only five years ago, when UX wasn't on anyone's radar outside the tech world. For a designer like myself, it's easy to recognize which executives know their products intimately, and which manage from a spreadsheet. Thankfully, I'm seeing the emergence of a new generation of UX-oriented leaders with little patience for the hands-off approach. They recognize that as UX eclipses traditional brand marketing, they need to be more hands-on with their products.

When most organizations try to increase their innovation efforts, they always seem to start from the same assumption: "we need more ideas." They'll start talking about the need to "think outside the box" or "blue sky" thinking in order to find a few ideas that can turn into viable new products or systems. However, in most organizations, innovation isn't hampered by a lack of ideas, but rather a lack of noticing the good ideas already there.

Double is the simplest, most elegant way to be somewhere else in the world without flying there. The minimalist design and intuitive touchscreen controls allow you to freely move around without inconveniencing others. You can stay at eye level, whether sitting or standing, by adjusting your height remotely, which makes conversations fluid and real. Retractable kickstands will automatically deploy to conserve power when you are not moving around. Efficient motors and lightweight design give Double the ability to last all day without recharging the battery.

You’ve heard it before: 2011 2012 2013 is the year of 3-D printing. The future is here! The individual will wrench manufacturing power from the global industrial complex! Basement hobbyists, programmers, and nerds unite! Anyone with the machine and the know-how can be their own engineer, designer, maker.

Like flying dragon drones at Disneyland and real working Tron lightcycles , some ideas are just so cool that they're practically inevitable. That's why it should now come as no surprise that someone has actually managed to construct what may be the most meta-Maker-thing ever: the world's first Lego 3D printer.

Created by UserStudio, DIRTI for iPad is a physical interface for the iOS that uses Tapioca grains or anything else that’s semi-transparent and that you can mold, like vanilla ice cream for example to control content on the iOS. The user can interact with the iPad by moving the material around in a sand-blasted dish.

When thinking through the implications of a new technological development, it can be tempting to take the designers’ word on how something will be used in order to play out the results. After all, they built it, they should know what it’s good for, right? And quite often they do--and many people end up using the new tools and systems just as the inventors intended.

The Lytro appears to be the future of camera technology. Its claim to fame is sucking in not just one piece of light per pixel, but all sorts of pieces of light flying in from all variety of directions. So rather than one perspective, you capture several unique perspectives (or layers) for each pixel of your photo.

But while the Lytro allows crazy digital stunts , like refocusing an image after it’s taken, or creating a 3-D perspective of a photo captured through a single lens, its industrial design has been modeled more after a dSLR than a smartphone camera. So editing and sharing takes place on a laptop, long after an image was taken, rather than in real time.

Light meters are less common now than they used to be. Now that we can see our photos right after we’ve shot them and delete, adjust settings and re-shoot, some people just don’t see the merit in spending $300+ on a professional meter.

Of course, a light meter can be an amazing tool , and so the folks at Lumu Labs have designed one they’re calling “the light meter of the 21st century”: a tiny, iPhone attachable light meter that claims to perform far outside its price range.

Creative content not only stands out, but it has the power to impact people emotionally. Since people make decisions based on emotions, it’s the only effective way to market. As Diane von Furstenberg said on her panel at the conference, “people share emotional content often and content about your products almost never.”

Designing for human limitations: a scientific perspective on minimal design.

Quick, try to recall the last five seconds that just passed as accurately as you can. What’s that, you can’t? Well, that means that you are just like the rest of us: blissfully unaware of our limitations. Try and think of 12 items of any description, write them down so you can check them out later, and then stop thinking about them. Do whatever you want: hang the laundry, do the dishes, you could even clean up your room for once, but let time fly over you (but not by much) and then come back, sit down, take a deep breath and try to recall the 12 items that you wrote.

How can we, then, function in a society that demands so much from us? A society that demands attention spans longer than 12 seconds, multi tasking skills on par with an octopus on Ritalin, and the amazing ability to sit on a chair (for those lucky few) doing God knows what four hours at a time? The answer is simple: we don’t need to. Our brain in its infinite wisdom decided to carry that load for us, it decided to let us handle only what we could instead of what we should, running on autopilot most of the time, leaving the low level tasks to automated scripts and the rest, a hyper condensed blurb version of reality, to us.

How can we design for such a brain? How can we attempt to see that which is never shown, how can we crack the black box without crashing the plane? The answer is simple as well: we don’t need to. We design, instead, for the painfully limited, but infinitely more understandable, conscious self so that we can reach behind it. We turn those human limitations into design limitations, giving birth to minimal design, which instinctively strives to appeal to our conscious (and unconscious) instincts and perceptive models by removing anything that needs some form of high level cognitive functions, leaving only immediate, straight, instinctive, and direct comprehension because, truth be told, our eyes want it simple and clean.

Chinese material scientists have created the world’s lightest material: A graphene aerogel that is seven times lighter than air, and 12% lighter than the previous record holder ( aerographite ). A cubic centimeter of the graphene aerogel weighs just 0.16 milligrams — or, if you’re having a problem conceptualizing that, a cubic meter weighs just 160 grams (5.6 ounces). The graphene aerogel is so light that an cube inch of the stuff can be balanced on a blade of grass, the stamen of a flower, or the fluffy seed head of a dandelion (see pictures below).

The newly formed company haven’t revealed any great details about the product, but they’re calling themselves a “wearable computing and augmented reality venture” and claim they’ve “developed an amazing pair of stereoscopic glasses combined with super low latency gesture tracking”.